ACADEMIA

The success of Dolphin Interconnect's Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) as a high-performance cluster interconnect has generated an increased array of software options for customers. This has resulted in Dolphin's decision to unbundle the software component of its popular WulfKit clustering interconnect solution. "Our customers are seeing an increased range of SCI software tools from which to choose when building a cluster with WulfKit, without being required to pay for bundled software that may not be used in their application," said Keith Murphy, VP Sales for Dolphin WulfKit now consists of an SCI interconnect card and the SCI cables required to connect it with other SCI cards in a clustered array of servers. WulfKit pricing has also been adjusted lower to reflect the unbundling of the software and the reduced hardware costs. Current pricing is available on the Dolphin web site at www.dolphinics.com. In 1999 when WulfKit was first introduced, very limited software existed, so offering a complete hardware/software bundle provided a convenient solution for customers. Now, as market awareness and acceptance has solidified, a wide range of new software tools have been introduced offering customers increasingly sophisticated options for deploying their SCI clusters. Scali, one of the original vendors to offer SCI software for the HPC clustering market, continues to provide a broad set of tools including MPI Connect for SCI and Scali Manage with exciting extensions and improvements. Other SCI software tools now available include ClusterFrame from Qlusters, Nimbus from Linux Labs, SCI-MPICH open source from RWTH. Another vendor with SCI support in development is the original software cluster manager solution Scyld. In addition to third-party software, Dolphin continues to provide the latest versions of high-performance libraries for a range of popular processor platforms, plus open source (GPL) modules, such as SISCI, SCI_SOCKETS and SCI_MPICH. "We're very pleased with market response over the past year to our SCI technology and the expanding software options that are now available from third parties," said Kare Lochsen, Dolphin Interconnect CEO. "It's reasonable to expect that these options will continue to grow at a substantial pace, making SCI an even more viable clustering option for an increasing number of applications," Lochsen explained.